CHAPTER 1

The Soldier’s Body

A Little Cog in a Giant War Machine

I am a little cog in the massive, creaky, and ungreased machine called the Army.

—Vladimir Stezhenskii

In the course of the war the Red Army had to transform millions of Soviet citizens into usable components of its war machine. The immense scale of the war would bring people into the army who would otherwise never have served. These soldiers were faceless to those at the top, who mobilized them as numbers on paper, but a good commander knew those under his command intimately and treated them as individuals. In 1943 Lieutenant Mikhail Loginov walked the ranks of his platoon of thirty-seven men and reflected: “They are all dressed in the same uniform. To the outside observer they all look the same, but these are different people. Even from afar you can recognize each one by his gait. They wear their helmets, carry their pack and rifle each in their own way. Each has his own personality. Every soldier is a particular, separate world, and each deserves respect.”1 He was a school teacher, a Russian from Kazan. His sergeant was a middle-aged Russian veterinary assistant, his corporal an Uzbek textile worker, his machine gunner a giant man who had been a mid-level manager on a collective farm. His other soldiers included a worker from Moscow, a boy who graduated from high school on the eve of the war, and two shepherds—a young Ukrainian and an aged Uzbek. This last soldier, the Uzbek shepherd Dzhuma, caught Loginov’s attention. He was his worst soldier (a sectarian pacifist) and had traveled the longest distance, both literally and figuratively, to be in the army. Loginov imagined the naked, shaken Dzhuma standing before a medical commission, shamed by the presence of a woman, and then stepping onto a train (probably for the first time) that would take him and other recruits to Central Russia. Dzhuma’s body and fate had ceased to belong to him. The shepherd’s experience could describe that of a peasant from any remote region, as he left the comfort of familiar territory and lifestyle for an unknown fate.² Dzhuma and his comrades—men and women, urban workers, students, peasants, and shepherds—all became cogs in a giant military machine. Their bodies were subject to a new disciplinary regime and way of life as numbered, largely interchangeable components in the Red Army.

FIGURE 1.1 Red Army soldiers on the march, 1944. RGAKFD 0-92459 (Velikzhanin).

The government laid claim to the bodies of these men and women, handing them over to the commanders who were deputized to use these human resources to wage war. Commanders were tasked with training, tracking, and properly exploiting their soldiers and given almost total control over their subordinates’ bodies. They often saw their units as fiefdoms over which they had total dominion.3 With this power came great responsibility: a good commander was supposed to be able to turn anyone into a soldier.

Both the government and its deputies were forced to reckon not only with the physical bodies of soldiers but also with the souls that animated them. This was made all the more difficult by the demographic diversity of those serving, men aged seventeen to fifty-five, women, former criminals and almost all of the ethnic groups of the heterogeneous USSR.4 The army drafted a document, the Red Army booklet, which turned these diverse citizens into legible mechanisms of a military machine. Past experiences could be negated or key to the fate of a soldier. Whole ethnic groups were deported from the ranks while formerly déclassé elements entered them. Professional skills such as being a cook, tailor, or poet could define how a soldier served or be ignored completely. The war reshaped the contours of belonging and exclusion in Soviet society in unpredictable ways.

The diversity observed by Loginov was in part by design, but much more the result of massive losses in the first months of the war. The casualties suffered by the army in 1941 and 1942 were catastrophic—from June 22 through December 31, 1941, 3,137,673 were killed, missing, or captured.⁵ On top of this, over 5.6 million draft-age males were left behind enemy lines, and the last prewar draft had only managed to reach 28 percent of those eligible for service.⁶ Between January 1, 1942, and January 1, 1943, 11,245,740 men and women were sent to the front, over 4 million of whom had recovered from wounds and returned to the ranks. By January 1, 1943, the army had suffered 5,639,782 permanent losses (killed, missing, captured, sick, etc.), and 7,543,004 recoverable casualties. At the same time, 2 million men went undrafted on enemy territory, and there were 10,000,942 people in the ranks of the army. In that year alone the average rifle division had gone through 234 percent of its combatants (boevoi sostav). It was estimated that there were only 3.7 million men left to be drafted into the army.⁷ By war’s end, 11,273,026 were permanently lost, and 34,476,700 had been drafted (on average there were about 11,000,000 persons in uniform every year). In the active army at the front, there was an average of 5,778,500 people in ranks during any one month. The army at the front had gone through 488 percent of its average monthly strength from 1941 to 1945.⁸ In other words, it had been rebuilt five times.

The process of rebuilding the army required the government to take the raw material of a variety of civilians and turn them into the refined product of the soldier. Stalin’s famous 1945 toast in which he praised “simple Soviet people” as “the little cogs of history” betrayed key truths about soldiering, particularly in the Red Army.⁹ Millions of men and women would become soldiers, but before they became “little cogs” in the vast war machine of the Red Army, they had been civilians of every stripe, from shock workers to Gulag inmates.

FIGURE 1.2 Junior Sergeant D. A. Iablokov and Dr. E. I. Kolpakova, Frontline Rest Home, Kalinin Front, 1942. RGAKFD 0-60235.

The Draftee’s Body

After begging to be allowed to join the army several times, Grigorii Baklanov (who would go on to become an artillery officer and famous novelist) finally found an officer who saw his potential, declaring, “A person is such material that you can sculpt anything from him.”10 The bodies of new recruits were raw material for the army. The army wanted either to negate or to utilize prior identities and could not ignore the prewar experience that was often imprinted on soldiers’ bodies and recorded in their personal documents.

The Red Army drew from a diverse population. According to the 1939 census, roughly 170,000,000 people lived in the USSR. Peasants outnumbered urbanites by about two to one (56,125,139 urban vs. 114,431,954 rural). Russians were the largest single ethnic group, constituting a majority with almost 60 percent of the population (99,500,000 people), followed by Ukrainians (almost 16.5 percent and about 28,000,000 people) and Byelorussians (a little over 5,000,000 and just over 3 percent). Other major ethnic groups included Uzbeks (4,800,000, almost 3 percent), Tatars (4,300,000, a little over 2.5 percent), Kazakhs (3,100,000, 1.8 percent), Jews (3,000,000, 1.78 percent), Azeris (2,300,000, 1.3 percent), Georgians (2,200,000, 1.3 percent), and Armenians (2,100,000, 1.3 percent). More than fifty officially recognized languages were spoken in the Soviet Union. There were thirty-seven million men aged twenty to thirty-nine (the usual age of mobilized soldiers). Ninety percent of men were literate (this could vary dramatically by ethnic group and age), although only around 1,092,221 people had a higher education and 13,272,968 had received a full secondary education. These figures shifted slightly with the annexation of Bessarabia, Eastern Poland, and the Baltic Republics on the eve of the war, but the Slavic, rural core continued to predominate.11

The ideal soldier of the Red Army was young; educated; Russian, Ukrainian, or Byelorussian; and a member of the Communist Party or Komsomol. By 1942 the number of these cadres fell far short of demand.¹² The decimation of the regular army, together with the grueling realities of mechanized warfare, led to the Soviet government significantly widening the scope of potential cadres. The prewar categorization of soldiers’ bodies included three basic categories: suitable for combat positions, suitable for noncombat tasks, and unsuitable, as well as a note on whether these men had received training or not. Exemptions existed for specialists, and men could receive a deferment for study, illness, or work, although many of those who were eligible for exemption enlisted.¹³ Accounting for the war saw a variety of new categories added. Sex, age, criminal convictions, and nationality all became classifications.

Wide swaths of the population that had been excluded from the honor of military service before the war became included as the war dragged on. “Former people” or déclassé elements left over from the old regime found their way into the army, including those who had served in the White Army.¹⁴ Criminals had their sentences commuted at enlistment. Bandits and political criminals were not eligible for this redemption.¹⁵ In 1943 there was a further reexamination of cadres, with more petty criminals and even the children of political criminals allowed to serve.¹⁶ The need to fill the ranks gave many people a chance to escape their pasts.¹⁷

Prisoners of war (POWs), despite officially being considered traitors, factored into the army’s plans from the winter of 1941, when significant numbers were liberated. Between 1942 and 1945, 939,700 soldiers who had been POWs or missing were called back into the ranks.¹⁸ All soldiers escaping encirclement (okruzhentsy) or liberated from POW camps were subjected to filtration in special camps.¹⁹ This could be a harrowing experience, as those who had just undergone life in POW camps, where many starved, were submitted to humiliating interrogations similar to those of enemy prisoners.²⁰ Food was often poor, conditions crowded, and lice rampant. However, it seems that these operations were concerned primarily with supplying the army with as many soldiers as possible. This is implied by the estimates of numbers of soldiers to come out of filtration in the reports of Red Army officers in charge of staffing and reports by soldiers who went through the process.²¹

POWs and petty criminals were not the only group invited back into the fold. Peasants had been viewed with distrust and forced onto collective farms a decade before the war. “Kulaks,” a category that crystallized the Soviet hostility toward the peasantry as a whole, were not allowed to serve in the army in 1941. Defined by their supposed wealth, exploitation of others’ labor, and backwardness, those described by this catchall term could include anyone who local officials perceived as dangerous or resisting collectivization. Initially heavily taxed, this category of people was eventually repressed, with some being executed, some fleeing for the cities, and many being sent to resettlement in remote regions of the USSR. All kulaks lost their property as a form of punishment. However, in May 1942 dekulakized peasants became subject to the draft. In the ranks they were often treated with condescension, sometimes described as errant children, but their family members were to be freed from the restrictions that had forced many to live in special settlements in some of the least desirable areas of the Soviet Union.22 This great reversal signaled that loyalty was increasingly mapped onto nationality rather than class.

The identification of Soviet power and Russian patriotic traditions was one of the most significant shifts of the prewar period and only intensified during the war. The very name of the war harkened back to the struggle against Napoleon. As the war continued, the government took major efforts to identify itself with traditional Russian ways in an attempt to secure the loyalty of soldiers. Restrictions against religious practices were significantly loosened. Churches and mosques were reopened during the war, the governing bodies of religious institutions reconstituted, and religious leaders recruited to help propagandize the war.²³ However, the reification of the Motherland and Fatherland, connecting soil and people, could lead to exclusion. At the beginning of the war, Germans, Finns, and other peoples belonging to groups whose countries of ethnic origin were at war with the Soviet Union (estimated at 250,000 men in 1942) were exempted from service in the active army and sent to the labor army, a much worse-supplied organization that performed menial labor. As the Wehrmacht occupied large portions of the Soviet Union, the categories of those who would not be accepted into the ranks expanded, while several whole nationalities were labeled “traitor nations.”²⁴ Entire nations that were perceived as collaborators (e.g., Crimean Tatars, Chechens, and Kalmyks) were later deported from their homelands to internal exile in Central Asia. Soldiers from these nationalities were expelled from the ranks to join their co-ethnics in exile. But even before the emergence of “traitor nations,” nationality was a complicated subject in the army.

Unprecedented numbers of “non-Russians” served in the army during the Great Patriotic War. The Russian language became a mandatory subject in schools throughout the Soviet Union only in 1938, and millions of soldiers had little to no knowledge of the language of command. Before the war men drafted from “non-Russian” regions would have months to integrate into the army or serve in special territorial units. However, territorial units were officially abandoned on the eve of the war, only to be revived again in 1941–1942, largely as a stopgap measure. The lack of experience, training, and supplies led many of these units to disaster at the front. In 1942 some staffers initially refused to use cadres from the Caucasus or Central Asia. Then an array of extraordinary events forced the army to recognize these cadres as needing special attention, and “non-Russians” and more specifically “potential induct-ees from Central Asia and the Caucasus” appeared as a new category in internal memos circulating among staffing officers.25 Some commanders were so frustrated with these alien cadres that they eagerly awaited heavy casualties that they hoped would lead to a new batch of Slavic soldiers.²⁶

The army eventually created a support network for “non-Russians” that included special propagandists and translators, political officers, and a print network dedicated to providing “non-Russians” with information in their native languages. Some commanders and soldiers believed that it was better to keep co-ethnics together so that they could help each other, while others were certain that they fought better when separated from one another.²⁷ Either way, everyone was supposed to melt into an organization where nationality was often muted, and soldiers of all nationalities were affectionately referred to as slaviane.²⁸ Some “non-Russians” even adopted Russian or Russified names at the front: for example, Rafgat Akhtiamov wrote his parents that his Russian comrades called him Raphael (Rafail’), while Talgat Genatulin became Anatolii, a name that stuck through his whole life.²⁹ This could be seen as an act of conscious identification with the culture of the army and later its victory, rather than a negation of ethnic particularism.³⁰ Experience showed that when properly trained, attended to, and given time to learn Russian, these troops performed as well as others. By August 1943 internal memos of the army’s political department could boast that “non-Russians” had become true soldiers.³¹ However, after the “non-Russians” had been integrated, a different category of draftees presented a new set of problems.

“Non-Russians,” even if they had not been fully integrated into Soviet society, had been part of the Soviet Union since its formation. Soldiers drawn from regions that had become Soviet only on the eve of the war (Western Ukraine, Western Byelorussia, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) presented a different set of problems. They had not had time to become integrated into the Soviet system, and many were hostile to it, as they had fresh memories of sovereignty. Soviet power was associated with violence, deportations, and the nationalization of property. The Baltic Republics all fielded their own national military units, each of which had a special corporate identity. These Baltic formations, all of which had been given adequate time to train, fought well. However, draftees from Bessarabia and Western Ukraine from 1944 on often presented a serious challenge to political officers and commanders as differences in culture and language were dramatic.32 Aleksandr Shcherbakov, head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army, warned high-level political officers of the special case that these recruits presented. They were overwhelmingly illiterate and deeply religious, and many had never seen such trappings of modernity as films, farm machinery, or a radio. Political officers perceived these men as coming from a different time, not having progressed through the stages of history through which the October Revolution and Stalin had ushered the Soviet Union. This perception led to specific propaganda aimed at integrating them into the Soviet fold and motivating them to fight.³³ These people were socialized into Soviet society in the ranks of the army, under unusually difficult conditions. Much like Dzhuma, our Uzbek draftee, they were in for a shock even greater than most of their comrades and were likely to receive duties in the most expendable positions.³⁴

At the opposite end of the spectrum were the college students, factory workers, and other “politically conscious” people who volunteered to serve in the narodnoe opolchenie—People’s Guard units that formed as the Wehrmacht closed in on major cities at the beginning of the war. This practice traded lives for time, as these poorly trained and armed formations were often devastated in short order, decimating the ranks of those who would have gone on to become scholars, writers and artists, although some People’s Guard units went on to become elite formations.³⁵ The People’s Guard led many college-educated people into the army for the first time. Commanders and veteran soldiers had a variety of responses to the sudden presence of the intelligentsia in the ranks. Grigorii Baklanov recalled the antipathy of his drill sergeant toward educated soldiers, while a commander interviewed by the Mints Commission said that despite initial misgivings that “an educated person won’t last long,” intelligenty under his command had become “the real deal.”³⁶ Often worker and scholar, young and old, served together in the People’s Guard, offering a preview of what became general trends.

The age of soldiers in the ranks expanded dramatically, ranging from seventeen to fifty-six.³⁷ Older soldiers were often celebrated: The World War I veteran who had returned to the ranks and sometimes slipped into old regime language was a stock figure of wartime propaganda.³⁸ Young men who were of the more traditional draft age were sometimes viewed with derision as they acted “just like children”—playing with shrapnel and constantly complaining.39 General Erëmenko, commanding the Stalingrad Front, told the war correspondent Vasilii Grossman that “The youth have no life experience; they are like kids; wherever you send them, that’s where they die. The smartest soldier is twenty-five to thirty years old. And the older soldier—he is not quite healthy; his family is on his mind.”⁴⁰ These older soldiers were often assigned to noncombat roles such as cooks in order to free young men for combat, but older men were not the only ones fulfilling household duties.

Starting in 1941, women were introduced into the army in uneven ways and into specific specializations on a mostly voluntary basis.⁴¹ One of their main tasks was to free men for combat duties. Women also served in front-line positions—most notably as pilots, snipers, anti-aircraft gunners, communications specialists, medics, and traffic controllers.⁴² Women’s performance at the front was often highly rated. Moreover, it was believed that women made the front a more civilized place: “it is simply pleasant to meet a neat, clean girl among the dirty soldiers at the front.” Some feared that service would disrupt women’s ability to fulfill their role as mothers and provide another generation of Soviet warriors.⁴³ Women’s bodies presented a particular problem to the army. Their figures were often too small for military clothing, and the army was indecisive on whether to order clothing be made unisex or to make concessions to women. All military documents used the grammatically male form. Yet traditional gender roles would affect women’s service, and women were often faced with what we would now call sexual harassment, a theme that I discuss in more detail later.

Soldiers’ bodies could speak to their histories, which in turn could have an impact on their present. Despite the expansion of cadres, specific branches of service still had precise physical standards. Deranged and mentally underdeveloped men were rejected from the service. NKVD (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del—People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, i.e., the secret police) men couldn’t suffer from hemorrhoids, commanders couldn’t have speech impediments, paratroopers couldn’t weigh more than 80 kilograms, and tankers had to have powerful hearts and lungs.⁴⁴ It was common to find former criminals in reconnaissance units, as the skills necessary in both endeavors overlapped.⁴⁵ Peasants ended up overwhelmingly in the infantry, while urban cadres, who were generally more educated, often found themselves in technical branches of service with longer life spans. Prewar profession could determine wartime specialization, because drivers, cooks, writers, artists, thespians, and others could ply their trades in the army. Differences among soldiers were enhanced by the various forms of body modification that could be observed among soldiers, including tattoos among criminals and circumcision among Jews and Muslims. Soldiers from different regions might vary by height, particularly those who were less severely or wholly unaffected by collectivization and wartime hunger. A commander in the Latvian Rifle Division remarked that “you looked like a kid next” to Latvians, with size 45–46 [12–13 US sizes] boots being the norm and one soldier having size 49 [US 16] boots. Later the unit received reinforcements from Leningrad and Tashkent, starving men who needed to be brought back to strength before serving.46

FIGURE 1.3 “Combat girlfriends” anti-aircraft gunners M. Gerasimova and E. Bukhanova, May 1943. A 76mm m.1938 anti-aircraft gun is visible in the background. RGAKFD 0-154797 (Gribovskii).

The army was interested principally in bodies, but it could not ignore souls. Commanders needed to inspire men and women from a wide variety of backgrounds to risk their lives saving a state that some of them despised. There were numerous ways in which the government attempted to appeal to those in the ranks. One side of the coin was positive motivation. Drawing on Russian and “non-Russian” national traditions, as well as revolutionary traditions, showcasing German atrocities and by attempting to provide for their families, the state provided a variety of reasons to fight. The other side of this coin was coercion and discipline. While discipline is key to any army’s success, the Red Army had a particular problem of trying to cobble together a fighting force from inexperienced civilians to fight a professional enemy who was rapidly advancing deep into Soviet territory. These prerogatives, combined with the Bolshevik readiness to sacrifice lives now for a brighter future, led to a draconian disciplinary regime. Despite this, the army kept remarkably poor track of its soldiers at the beginning of the war.

Becoming State Property

The living and the dead were often undocumented in the war’s early days. Although Red Army regulations laid out a clear system of documenting the dead, these proved inadequate, and there was no consistent system in place to document living soldiers.⁴⁷ Every soldier was issued a “personal medallion” or “death medallion,” a Bakelite cylinder with two long thin pieces of newsprint recording all of a soldier’s personal information. Worn in a special pocket on the trousers, this was the Red Army’s equivalent of a dog tag, one copy staying in the capsule with the body, the other being collected by the commander as a record. The capsule was exclusively meant to document the dead and not the living, being shut tight at all times to prevent moisture from destroying the flimsy paper inside. Many soldiers refused to fill out the information, believing that if they used them as directed, they were sealing their own fate. The documents were popularly referred to as “death passports.” Soldiers often ritualistically threw them away for good luck, and the capsules proved so unpopular that they were discontinued in November 1942, because all the same information could be found in a new document introduced in 1941.⁴⁸

The Red Army began the war without a single, army-wide document that could be used to identify soldiers at the front. A Red Army book that contained detailed information about the soldier and his service was cancelled in 1940, and in practice was to be collected from the soldier before going to the front anyway. By the fall of 1941 it had become apparent that this situation was a serious danger to the army. As Stalin noted, the lack of documents meant that “our division, which ought to be a closed fortress, impenetrable to outsiders, has become in practice a public thoroughfare.” Enemy agents could easily penetrate the army and already had. Without proper documentation, it was impossible to see if legitimate soldiers were receiving and taking care of their allotted uniforms, equipment, and weapons. In the chaos of encirclements, retreats, and rushed mobilizations of 1941, it was often impossible to control and document the movement of soldiers, let alone find deserters or spies.49

On October 7, 1941, a new Red Army booklet (Krasnoarmeiskaia knizhka) was instituted that was to be immediately issued to all soldiers in the ranks. Signed by the soldier and his immediate superior, showing (in theory) the bearer’s photograph and stamped with the unit’s seal, these flimsy sheets of newsprint became the only proof of identity. Any soldier caught without a Red Army booklet was to be arrested as a suspected spy. The Red Army booklet tied soldiers to their unit to every piece of equipment they were issued. It was a document that stated identity and responsibility very clearly. In the rear these documents were to be checked every day during morning inspection, and at the front at least every three days.⁵⁰ A propaganda campaign surrounded its introduction with the two-pronged messages of vigilance against impostors and responsibility for all state property one had been issued.⁵¹ While its introduction highlighted the chaos and carelessness that could be found in the army, the categories that composed it and the way in which it was used reveal how the state had come to view its “little cogs.”

A soldier’s Red Army booklet contained all of the information the army deemed necessary about its cadres. Name, education, nationality, birthdate, prewar occupation, next of kin and their address, and blood type were all that was written of soldiers’ prewar life. Their wartime life was recorded via date and place of induction, specialization, unit, ID number, notes on where they had served, when they had taken their oath of service, wounds they had received, which medals they had been awarded and weapons issued along with their serial numbers, uniforms and equipment issued, and on the final page, their sizes. On the pages of the Red Army booklet, the biography of a soldier was reduced to the army’s parameters and tied to the objects issued to a soldier. The Red Army booklet also became the primary document used to record soldiers’ deaths, collected from the dead on the battlefield and in hospitals.

In some ways this document was simply a continuation of the prewar internal passport, documenting people and fixing them to a specific territory and profession—in this case, their military unit. However, it was issued much more widely than passports, and the Red Army booklet was the first passport-like document that the vast majority of peasants received. Often filled out via dictation, under circumstances where confirmation of details was impossible, many soldiers, including wanted criminals, had a chance to reinvent their biographies using the Red Army booklet.52 Aside from citizens’ editorial choices, the government was seriously reevaluating which points of biography mattered. Class had no place on the pages of this document, despite its predominance in the lives of Soviet citizens and on the pages of the Soviet passport and application forms. While class would still be recorded in the files of the NKVD, both the Red Army booklet and official propaganda encouraged soldiers and commanders to ignore the class origins of its fighters, focusing instead on what they had done at the front.⁵³

The exclusion of class and inclusion of such categories as profession, ethnicity, and education reveal what the state needed from its soldiers. While soldiers were interchangeable components in a military machine, not every soldier was the same sort of part. An uneducated soldier could not be used as a translator, while a linguist could not be used as an engineer. Both formally and informally, on the level of the army and individual unit, the ranks were periodically swept for specialists—writers, translators, cooks, tailors, cobblers, carpenters, and others.⁵⁴ Every commander of a small unit wanted a cobbler and a woodworker. However, in dire situations, everyone could become cannon fodder, as the army gambled specialists’ lives for time. Nationality remained important, as an educated “non-Russian” could act as a translator for rural co-ethnics. Finally, as we shall see, the soldiers’ next of kin were used as a means to pressure them into compliance and sometimes as a determinant of reliability. Soldiers whose families were on nearby occupied territory might be highly motivated to liberate their home town or to desert to the enemy, depending on the situation. In May 1942 NKVD units in the Red Army were ordered to place special surveillance on soldiers with family on occupied territory, former special settlers, former convicts, prisoners of war, and those who escaped from encirclement.⁵⁵ This Red Army booklet carried with it a set of responsibilities that were simply draconian. Essentially, the soldier’s body became property of the army and the Red Army booklet could be seen as a user’s manual for the convenience of the commander who took control over this or that soldier. From the moment they entered the ranks, soldiers were made to understand that they had entered a different world.

The Civilian Body Transformed

Soldiers received notices to go to the draft board or came themselves to volunteer. They arrived carrying a few belongings according to instructions and were often accompanied by their families. Soldiers underwent a physical assessment and an interview about their past and family that some compared to a “difficult exam,” particularly if there was a skeleton in the closet such as a repressed family member.56 What followed was both a somber event and a celebration. In some cases the traditions of dancing and drinking with family members were revived, and generally soldiers were transported miles away from their point of induction to camps, physically separating them from their homes and families, often forever.⁵⁷

Literature and propaganda from the period drew a clear line between one’s prewar and wartime biography. On induction into the army, soldiers literally shed their previous identities. Passports were surrendered. They would eventually give up their civilian clothing, whether they wore suits, summer dresses, prison uniforms, or silken Central Asian robes.⁵⁸ Some soldiers, such as Old Believers or Orthodox Jews, had their identities challenged in fundamental ways as their beards were shorn to meet army regulations.⁵⁹ Some sent their clothes home to younger siblings or instructed their families to sell their clothing.⁶⁰ Other soldiers eagerly awaited the issue of military clothing so that they could sell or trade their civilian clothes for food.⁶¹ Guards Major Baurdzhan Momysh-uly, the son of a nomadic Kazakh herdsman who found his calling in the army, explained to inductees that they had entered a different world: “Yesterday you were people of different professions, different means. Yesterday there were among you rank-and-file kolkhozniki and directors. From today on you are fighters and junior commanders of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army.”⁶² Induction into the army was meant to partially erase one’s prewar identity. One diarist records consciously avoiding any thoughts of home and his loved ones in order to be as present with his comrades as possible.⁶³ An article for political officers reminded them that the loss of status could be crushing for those who had been pillars of their community suddenly thrust into a situation where they were no one, particularly for those who didn’t speak Russian.⁶⁴

Men’s heads would be shaven so that differences in age disappeared, as the poet Aleksandr Tvardovskii wrote: “Look—they are just like kids!/So who is, in truth, a greenhorn/Single or married [you can’t tell]/[Among] this shorn people.”⁶⁵ The privilege of having longer hair belonged to officers and those who had already served their standard term in the army (sverkhsrochniki), but with lice infestations this benefit could vanish.⁶⁶ Women had varied fortunes, from having their heads shaved or cropped to being allowed to wear long braids.

Soldiers learned to stand, move, and speak according to a set of regulations that were universal to the army and alien to the civilian world. They moved in ranks, regularly counted off to check that all were present, and became subject to constant surveillance by their superiors.67 Manuals demonstrated everything from the proper way to brush one’s teeth to how to form a marching column. Soldiers learned to move as massive biological machines, to hold their fists along the seams of their pants, with their feet forming a perfect “v.”⁶⁸ They were to sing on the march, and automatization of their actions was a sign of their perfection.⁶⁹ Every day they were to shave; a moustache was seen as a claim to special status.⁷⁰ Soldiers had lost autonomy over their bodies on the level of posture and hygiene, which were small outward indicators of a more fundamental shift in their status as resources to be used.

Discipline

Many soldiers failed to grasp the full extent of what the army demanded of them. Reports from early in the war show that soldiers who did not speak Russian were often unaware of the consequences of their actions, and in general discipline could be remarkably lax.⁷¹ Many soldiers and commanders were simply not used to military discipline.⁷² Anatolii Genatulin, a seventeen-year-old orphan who spoke almost no Russian when he entered the army, reflected on his coming of age in the barracks:

We had to have the boyish carelessness, laziness, childish sleepiness, and all we had learned about motherly pity toward physical and spiritual weakness beaten out of us and have our unripe bodies hammered into the yoke of military ranks, to habituate our consciousness to the harsh ways of the army. In this crusty masculine society—where instead of the affectionate call of mother and gentle nagging you hear commands that resonate like metal, yells, and swearing—we were brutalized and ripened for the front, for killing and death.⁷³

The pouring of the soldier’s body into the “yoke of military ranks” carried with it the implicit understanding and explicit indicators that soldiers were no longer the masters of their own bodies. Momysh-uly warned recruits: “perhaps you were a good person before, perhaps people loved and praised you, but whoever and whatever you were earlier, if you commit a crime, an act of cowardice or treason, you will be executed.”⁷⁴ However much the prewar Stalinist state used militaristic rhetoric and imposed harsh discipline on its citizens, the army, in which commanders regularly ordered soldiers to risk their lives and could take their lives for refusing commands, was orders of magnitude more stringent.

While the fact that soldiers were expected to risk their lives seems obvious, other aspects of how their bodies became the preserve of the state were less so. Soldiers were expected to eat only what the state provided them. While on guard duty, they were forbidden “to leave their post, sleep, sit, lean against anything, talk, eat, drink, smoke, sing, answer the call of nature, accept any object from any person, become distracted from continuous observation of their position.”75 Soldiers were forced to exert themselves on the march and in combat in ways that pushed them to the limits, as one commander wrote home to his wife: “it would be enough to tell you that in three days I walked ninety-two kilometers and slept for an hour and a half. This fundamental test of nerves has ended, and I didn’t break.”⁷⁶ There was no option but to keep moving during forced marches, and soldiers learned to sleep while walking.⁷⁷ According to Vasil’ Bykov, this could lead to a state of “total indifference” and near stupor punctuated by moments of fear and commands mixed with profanity.⁷⁸ However, none of this was unusual for armies at the time.

What made the Red Army particular was a readiness to use force against its own soldiers and to treat their families as hostages. The authors of the 1940 Code of Discipline reasoned that discipline should be “higher, stronger, and more severe” in a society without class conflict, which demanded absolute loyalty. “The order of a commander or leader is law for his subordinate.” Commanders were also reminded that they were responsible for any breakdowns in discipline and that they were allowed to use any methods, including fists and bullets, against those who “failed to follow orders, openly resisted, or maliciously failed to observe discipline.”⁷⁹ While most infractions led to less severe punishment, the threat of violence was always present. Most soldiers witnessed a show execution during their service, in which soldiers were assembled to watch and sometimes required to pull the trigger themselves. These executions often served as punishment for self-mutilation or attempted desertion.⁸⁰ These were highly ritualized actions in which the army made clear its right to take the lives of soldiers in its service. These displays often left witnesses shocked and disgusted, even when they agreed with the sentence.⁸¹

Despite an already harsh regime, in both 1941 and 1942 the army issued orders to make the disciplinary regime more severe and threat of violence more explicit. Even so, the state remained ambiguous as to how important violence was to its strategy. For example, in September 1941 an order was issued that gave the commanders of divisions and their commissars the right to sign death sentences, but within a month another corrective order decried the use of repression as opposed to “educational work.”82 These orders could be seen as either a series of improvisations by a regime that was on the verge of collapse or as purposefully leaving room for maneuver for commanders. The two most famous orders expanding the use of violence, no. 0270 and no. 227, deserve closer attention, as these were the two key rulings on the use of violence as a motivator.⁸³

Order 0270, issued on August 16, 1941, gave subordinates the right to execute their superiors if they should panic.⁸⁴ Order 227, issued on July 28, 1942, the (in)famous “Not one step backward” order, which was read to all troops and became a motto for the army, established a new, harsher disciplinary regime. This order stated that panicky soldiers were contributing to a “retreating mood” in the army. It called for the destruction of panic mongers and cowards “on the spot” and labeled anyone retreating without orders a traitor. The order established blocking detachments, well-armed formations placed in the rear of “unstable divisions” to keep soldiers from retreating, by opening fire if necessary. Declaring that they were adopting German tactics, it established penal units for commanders and soldiers who had disgraced themselves; such units were to take on the most dangerous tasks in order to “expiate their sins with blood.” Penal units provided an alternative to executions for serious crimes and thus a more practical way to use the lives of soldiers and commanders who had failed to live up to the Red Army’s superhuman standards.⁸⁵ Both orders gave an immense amount of discretionary power to commanders, who had an expansive right to kill their subordinates.

Damnation of cowards went beyond death. The families of soldiers who surrendered to the enemy were also to be punished, a fact announced to soldiers, occasionally at special meetings.⁸⁶ Propaganda stressed repeatedly that there was no future for the traitor and that even his loved ones would forsake him.⁸⁷ Soldier’s responsibilities, and the legal consequences of failure, were common themes of agitation. Copies of the Military Oath, in Russian and a variety of other languages, were common pieces of print propaganda. To the very end of the war, this document remained a key part of agitation and propaganda.⁸⁸ The last line of the Military Oath reads, “If I maliciously break this solemn oath, then I will suffer severe punishment by Soviet law, the total hatred and scorn of the working people.”⁸⁹ Executions carried with them the confiscation of all property, leaving beneficiaries with nothing.

In moments of panic or under extreme duress soldiers sometimes shot themselves in the hand or foot in order to be evacuated to the rear. In the Red Army, this act—called samostrel, “self-shooting,” or chlenovreditel’stvo, “self-mutilation”—was considered treason, punishable by execution or being sent to a penal unit. On August 2, 1941, the army’s Special Section (Osobyi otdel, i.e., secret police) was given permission to arrest and if deemed necessary execute practitioners of self-mutilation.90 Those attempting to injure themselves to escape the front found increasingly creative means. Usually these soldiers, dubbed samostrely or levoruchniki, shot themselves in the left hand (their right was still necessary to work after demobilization), through a piece of wood, bread, bucket, or cloth, so as not to leave a telltale powder burn on their hand. Surgeons, officers, and political organs learned to see through these methods, sometimes assigning specialists to look out for samostrely.⁹¹ Some soldiers “voted,” sticking their left hand above the trench at dawn until enemy soldiers shot it. Eventually military units statistically tracked left-hand injuries and all soldiers wounded in the left hand became suspect; those who “voted” could be caught and punished.⁹²

Many soldiers, particularly commanders, endorsed harsh punishments for samostrely and those who showed cowardice. The artillery officer Vasilii Chekalov reported that when confronted with a soldier who had shot himself in the hand because he feared for his wife and child, another soldier, almost in tears, screamed: “And you think that I don’t have a wife and child. All of us have someone that we need to fight for.” Chekalov himself called for the execution of this man, which was carried out immediately.⁹³ Momysh-uly imagined the thought process that led to acts of cowardice: “He loves life; he wants to enjoy air, land, and sky. And he decides that you can die and he will live. That’s how parasites live, at someone else’s cost.” However, he also discussed how difficult it was to kill one of his soldiers: it was like “cutting a piece of flesh from your own body”—but one that had become poisonous and dangerous to the rest.⁹⁴ Violence against those who failed to meet Bolshevik standards reified the community by purging it of the unworthy, highlighting the righteousness of those who had fulfilled what was expected of them, while providing a graphic demonstration of the price of failure. Commanders could use lethal force to ensure that their orders were fulfilled, and this threat of violence gave them a level of control over soldiers’ lives that bordered on ownership. Not everyone thought that the use of force was reasonable, and occasionally an understanding voice would defend the actions of a soldier who panicked in the first battle or whose nerves were worn out.⁹⁵ Furthermore, soldiers often perceived a commander who was too willing to wave his pistol at his subordinates as hysterical or cowardly.⁹⁶

The threat of violence was very real for soldiers in the Red Army, and 994,300 were prosecuted by military tribunals and ultimately tallied as a permanent loss for the army, although 400,000 of those prosecuted had their sentence commuted to service in a penal unit.97 An estimated 135,000 Red Army soldiers were executed after trials.⁹⁸ This was orders of magnitude higher than the Wehrmacht, which executed an estimated 15,000–20,000 soldiers, and the US Army, which executed only 142, almost all for murder or rape, with only one soldier, Eddie Slovik, executed for desertion.⁹⁹ According to the military lawyer Iakov Aizenshtat there were few options open to members of a tribunal other than execution, penal units, or full acquittal.¹⁰⁰ No official statistics concerning battlefield executions exist, but references to them are found in interviews, official reports, diaries, and memoirs. This appeal to violence was largely an act of desperation and sign of weakness, as the government used terror as a means to force poorly trained and supplied troops to do the impossible.¹⁰¹

The Subversion of Discipline

Despite the intensity of the disciplinary regime, there was a variety of ways in which soldiers subverted it. Among them were extreme acts such as “voting” and samostrel, though most forms of subversion were less dramatic. The fact that the army consisted largely of yesterday’s civilians meant that basic forms of discipline could be undermined by more informal structures, such as when soldiers on guard duty failed to stop people they knew or chatted with local civilians.¹⁰²

The disciplinary regime was functional only if the army could control soldiers, which in 1941 and 1942 was often impossible. In 1941 the single largest category of permanent losses were missing soldiers and POWs (2,335,482 or 52.2 percent).¹⁰³ Millions of soldiers refused the state’s claims over their persons, surrendering to the enemy in encirclements or crossing no man’s land to surrender. Their motivations for doing so varied from fear and a desire to help loved ones on enemy territory to principled opposition to the Soviet state. Often those whose families had suffered during the Revolution or collectivization crossed over to the enemy. In 1942 “non-Russians” were considered to be particularly susceptible to this temptation.¹⁰⁴ The Germans, for their part, put considerable resources into luring soldiers to desert to them, including leaflets and radio broadcasts.

Acts of desertion required explanation. State organs understood that terrible conditions would encourage desertions and, as subsequent chapters show, put significant effort into improving soldiers’ material conditions. Often desertion was seen as the work of internal enemies preying on the ignorant. One soldier interviewed by the Mints Commission was certain that the “non-Russian” deserters in his unit were villagers “manipulated by the basmachi [anti-government bandits]” as opposed to those who had attended Soviet school and were reliable.105 Acts of desertion and samostrel evoked a sense of failure in political officers akin to a priest who has failed to save a soul.¹⁰⁶

If soldiers were near their homes, the temptation to desert could be too much. Political Officer Reutov grudgingly noted in his diary in October 1942 that whole groups of soldiers from occupied regions, including political officers, were deserting to the enemy. He grudgingly concluded: “The Germans have a smart policy: they let them go home.”¹⁰⁷ At times when the army was in massive disarray, this could occur with virtually no consequences for the soldiers involved. The special war correspondent A. Gutman complained that a large number of soldiers near Voronezh returned to their villages as the Red Army retreated past them but were “forgiven everything” and drafted into the army with no questions asked once the army returned in 1943. He was disturbed that few were properly filtered and that “in a number of cases being home during the period when one’s village was occupied by the Germans was counted almost as a service: it was everywhere believed that every soldier drafted from formerly occupied territory would hate the Germans and earnestly beat them.”¹⁰⁸ While this laxity was surely based on the desperate need for manpower, it was not lost on these soldiers that if Soviet power did return to their village, it would be impractical to punish everyone. In addition, this sort of desertion had a logic more complex than individual survival, because it gave soldiers a chance to assist their families under occupation. Furthermore, during 1941 and 1942, when desertion was at its peak, the future existence of the Soviet Union looked unlikely.

Over 376,000 soldiers were prosecuted for desertion (and those were the ones the army could get its hands on).¹⁰⁹ Desertion by a few soldiers could lead to investigation and serious trouble; on an army-wide level it threatened collapse. As a result, commanders came up with creative methods to keep soldiers in place. Many tried to put Communists and Komsomol members on guard, because they were considered more reliable. An officer in the Latvian Rifle Division would make sure at least one Jew stood watch, knowing the Nazis would not take a Jew prisoner.¹¹⁰ On the eve of the Battle of Kursk, the army conducted a special operation code-named “Treason” (Izmena Rodine), in which specially trained soldiers pretended to be surrendering, then opened fire on the Germans who tried to take them prisoner. This had the expressed purpose of making surrender to the enemy more difficult.¹¹¹ But desertion remained a significant problem. Desertion and self-mutilation were the most severe affronts to the government’s claims on soldiers’ bodies, but other, less severe forms of subversion came from interpersonal relationships.

Men, Women, and Discipline

Mixing men and women in the ranks of the army led to particular disciplinary problems. First, there was the issue of physical difference and traditional ideas of gender. While demanding that women fulfill all regulations, “commanders and political officers should always remember that they are dealing with a warrior-girl, and not a man. They should take into account the peculiarities of the physical condition, character, and needs of a girl.”112 Second, the issues of sex and romance were unclear. On one hand, the Komsomol organization, which had mobilized more than half of the women into the army, made it clear through print propaganda and its activists that sex was forbidden. Virginity, or at least abstinence, was considered by many to be a part of military discipline for women, and women in the ranks were invariably referred to as “girls,” rather than women, with “woman” sometimes used as a term of derision that implied promiscuity.¹¹³ On the other hand, as early as 1942 members of the Army’s Main Political Directorate had made it clear that commanders were not to be punished for pursuing relations with their subordinates. As the head of the Main Political Department of the Army, Aleksandr Shcherbakov, stated in 1942 at a meeting of high-ranking political officers: “If people come together—a commander and a woman— then what is the big deal?”¹¹⁴ Shcherbakov made this statement after a series of complaints were lodged against commanders by the party organizations of various Red Army units. Commanders were clearly given the go ahead for consensual relations with their subordinates. A commander’s word was law, and as a result it was not obvious to some female soldiers and their commanders whether women in the ranks had the right to refuse advances by their superiors. Female soldiers who resisted unwanted advances could have their service made much more unpleasant—in one way or another, their commanders controlled their bodies. One sniper described a situation in which her commander literally ordered her to have sex with him and later threatened to shoot her if she did not acquiesce to his advances. When she resisted and had him punished, he retaliated by sending her to the most dangerous parts of the front.¹¹⁵ A scorned superior could get his subordinate killed or make her life miserable, and many commanders believed that they had a right to sex. In fact, the expectation of sex with subordinates was so common that one soldier recorded in his diary a particular system of organization in which commanders staked their rights to the favors of the medical personnel of their units: “A regimental doctor—if, of course, it’s a woman— lives with the regimental commander, a battalion doctor with the battalion commander… and so on… regulations breed habits of such strength in the army: that is, to always give preference to one’s seniors.”116 As we see from this quotation, sex and love could be regulated by military discipline in unexpected, informal ways. Women were forced to negotiate a very difficult situation, and a new category of soldier developed as a negative expression of their plight.

“PPZh” (Pokhodno-polevaia zhena—Mobile Field Wife) emerged during the war as a term of derision.¹¹⁷ Such women were considered by some in the ranks and at home to have prostituted themselves to get easier assignments in the army, and some veterans recalled: “Soldiers looked at these women with cheerful spite, saying ‘for some war is a stepmother, for others their tender mother,’ and most often with envy for those whom such a beauty kept warm.”¹¹⁸ Sex could be a way out of the army; pregnant women were discharged from service until September 1944, at which point maternity leave was established.¹¹⁹

The experiences of women, perhaps more than any other group, bring home the gravity of the claims that the army made on soldiers’ bodies. The state claimed and then transferred to its deputies total control over a soldier’s body. In the case of women, there were specific issues that men were unlikely to face. Total control was claimed, yet always negotiated among individuals, even if recourse to violence could ultimately turn this negotiation into a dictation of the commander’s will. The commander was given such discretion because he would be forcing people to risk and sometimes sacrifice their lives in order to defend the state. Commanders were charged with assembling and then operating a functioning military machine from the various components the government provided.

Military Machines and Their Use

Staffing officers occasionally referred to units as “military organisms,” but Stalin’s famous quip about soldiers as “the little cogs of history” is more accurate.¹²⁰ An organism that loses its heart dies. Most living things can never fully recover from the loss of a limb, while a machine can have its motor, tracks, or turret replaced, often without noticeable change. A military unit, when provided with either well-trained troops or given time to train them, could recover from massive losses in much the same way as a machine. However, unlike the components of a machine, soldiers are living, breathing organisms, all of whom had longer and more complicated histories and connections than a lathed or stamped piece of metal. These details could have an effect on when the state drafted and how it used what were supposed to become interchangeable parts in the machinery of war.

Most military units came off the battlefield as a shadow of their former selves after suffering heavy losses in personnel and equipment.121 As a rule, units were chronically understrength; it was not uncommon for a platoon, which would normally have thirty to forty soldiers, to have ten to twelve soldiers or even five, and not unheard of for a battalion, which should number over seven hundred, to have a only a few dozen soldiers in its ranks.¹²² With such dramatic turnover rates, the Red Army was concerned primarily with providing a stable foundation for a unit via a kostiak, or backbone of unchanging commanders and rear-area personnel who kept a unit’s traditions alive. As Mikhail Kalinin, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, told agitators, “a regiment or division can reconstitute itself after any battle as long as its backbone, embodying in itself the highly developed battle traditions of the unit, has survived.”¹²³ Some of those making up the “battle traditions” were ghosts, deceased men and women who were permanently added to the rolls of a unit for an extreme act of bravery, with their names called at reveille and inspection.¹²⁴ The commander and surviving veterans were to teach new, often undertrained soldiers how to fight, while the feats of the current and previous members of a unit were to serve as inspiration and create a sense of continuity and responsibility.¹²⁵ That many of the heroes were mentioned posthumously could have a disquieting effect on soldiers. From the standpoint of some frontline soldiers, the process of forming a kostiak was a sort of “natural selection” of rear-area personnel—people who found relatively safe positions who were sending frontline soldiers to their death.¹²⁶

Heavy losses among combat arms led to Red Army units becoming very dynamic social bodies. The constant motion of cadres in the Red Army created a different corporate culture from that in other armies. Mechanized combat ensured that people directly at the front would be killed or wounded in a short period of time. Aleksandr Lesin recalled in his diary how one officer criticized a soldier: “You really think that you are a good soldier? A good soldier doesn’t spend a long time in a company: he either gets wounded, or—he softened—or he dies heroically.”¹²⁷ While short lifespans at the front were not specific to the Red Army, the experience of wounded Red Army soldiers could differ from those of other armies.

In the US Army or the Wehrmacht, soldiers would generally be sent back to the units where they had previously served, but Red Army soldiers were usually sent first to training units, then to marching companies to be assigned to new units.¹²⁸ This could be devastating, as Valentina Chudakova remembered: “You’ll go where they send you. Does it really matter where they send you?’ No, it’s not all the same, not at all the same!… Frontoviks in the hospital say ‘‘We want to go home!’”129 Lightly wounded soldiers would go to the Medical Sanitary Battalion within their own division, but a more serious wound would send one to an evacuation hospital further to the rear, and only those with specializations such as translators or elite Guardsmen and cadets would stand a good chance of returning.¹³⁰ Some soldiers forged documents to return “home.” The deputy commander of the Thirty-sixth Guards Corps, General Maslov, described how his soldiers would even desert to be reunited with comrades, creating “scandals”: “He arrives, announces: ‘I was in such-and-such unit, I have come to serve.’ You write the commander of that unit: don’t worry, and don’t look for him, don’t count him as a deserter, he is serving with us.”¹³¹

This circulation of cadres meant that soldiers were constantly in flux, much like labor at Soviet construction sites. Soldiers would be forced to establish relationships every time they found themselves in a new unit. Letters of commendation and identity papers could be lost as they disappeared into the army’s bureaucratic apparatus.¹³² Some took advantage of this situation to reinvent themselves, falsely claiming rank and awards.¹³³ Soldiers’ military units were also their addresses, so wounded soldiers would often lose correspondences from loved ones. Going to the hospital was a loss of identity, often accompanied by the theft of personal property.¹³⁴ Even as the army was attempting to foster unit pride via the “strengthening of combat traditions,” it was clear to soldiers that they were interchangeable parts to the army.¹³⁵

The soldier’s unit was supposed to serve as a surrogate family, with commanders as father figures and comrades as siblings.¹³⁶ In practice this varied dramatically. One junior commander lamented that his men were faceless strangers: “You become a different person—a platoon commander. It is bad when you stop seeing a living person and see only an unbuttoned collar. But under these conditions, with such a massive turnover of people, any other way is almost impossible.”¹³⁷ Commanders often failed to learn the names of their subordinates.¹³⁸ Conversely, soldiers in elite units truly felt a sense of community, some even stating that after the war they spent time primarily with their frontline friends.¹³⁹ As the war progressed, more and more units gained Guards status and more soldiers found a stable home.

The flow of cadres could lead to a certain amount of horse-trading, as soldiers who had recovered from wounds were mixed with new recruits either to be sent as reinforcements to a unit or to collection points (sbornye punkty), where commanders gathered replacements and specialists. Mansur Abdulin, a veteran of Stalingrad and Kursk, recalled an informal arrangement in which men from the same region were allowed to serve in the same crew or squad. Abdulin, who was “a Tatar, Siberian, Urals local, Central Asian, and Muslim—all in one!” could claim soldiers with any of those connections. Old sergeants listened carefully when the Starshina filled out the soldier’s Red Army booklet in order to hear who they could claim. Abdulin described the joy of these meetings leading to “such happiness! Noise! the Starshina gets mad: ‘Shut down your market fair! [Prekratit’ iarmarku!].’”140 While some common past could help soldiers adapt to their new milieu, the military was unconcerned with and at times even hostile to such arrangements.¹⁴¹ Informal structures could soften the blow of entering a massive, impersonal institution, as people sought out any sort of common ground with their comrades in arms. It was, after all, with these strangers that one would face the dangers of combat.

Being Used: Soldier’s Bodies as Currency

In any army, generals gamble with their soldiers’ lives and accept losses as inevitable. Soldiers offer their bodies to harm in battle, becoming the currency of warfare.¹⁴² In training, Red Army soldiers were to “be prepared for self-sacrifice.” Propaganda frequently stipulated that a soldier’s duty was “To kill the enemy and stay alive yourself, and if you die, then to sell your life at a high price.”¹⁴³ The soldier’s body became a form of currency with which commanders tried to buy or maintain territory, destroy or protect machinery and other resources.¹⁴⁴ Some soldiers expressed bitterness about this, decrying that “Soldiers have always been manure.”¹⁴⁵ Others accepted high casualties as an inevitability and a sacrifice made for future generations and loved ones at home, stating fatalistically, “There is not and cannot be any other solution.”¹⁴⁶

Soldiers were just another type of resource for military planners. Losses were tallied in such a way that mortars, tanks, machine guns, and people were simply categories of resources that the enemy had lost or taken.¹⁴⁷ Grigorii Baklanov reflected in prose on the tension between the army’s com-modification of the soldier’s body and the family ties of the individual inhabiting the uniform:

before an operation has begun, it is known—approximately of course, not down to the exact number—how many will be killed, how many sent to the hospital, and how many of those will return to the ranks. And I am part of this, like any other unit, but me and no one else. Lt. Motovilov, a graduate of some year of the Second Leningrad Artillery School, can be replaced by another graduate of that school, and that won’t be a problem. But to you, Mother, I am irreplaceable.¹⁴⁸

People had volition, personalities and families that would mourn them, but to the army they were still ultimately resources to be used.

The modern machinery of war could irreversibly impact the human body. The Red Army instituted a disciplinary regime and claimed dominion over soldiers’ bodies in order to compel them to face the possibility of death and maiming to defend the state. Propaganda celebrated soldiers who struggled on after being fatally wounded or consciously sacrificed themselves in order for the army to advance. Heroes such as Tulegen Tokhtarov—who, according to his comrades, after being disemboweled “picked up his insides and shoved them into the wound, holding it with his left hand, while shooting with his right”—or Aleksandr Matrosov, who used his body to block a German machine gun bunker, were held up as examples for all to follow.149

Soldiers faced the possibility of death, which could be abstract, but they saw very concretely what shrapnel, bullets, and flames could do to the human body. Some reflected on how they or their friends had been maimed in combat. One commander asked rhetorically how a jocular friend “could smile with a shattered jaw.”¹⁵⁰ A sniper described how an explosion ripped through his body: “The whole right side of my body torn open—my face, head, hands, and feet… even my bones were visible—the meat was torn off them. But now none of that hinders my ability to hold a sniper rifle.”¹⁵¹ This soldier, echoing official tropes, blithely described terrible wounds from which he had recovered. Some reflected on how pieces of shrapnel became a part of them, sometimes being kept as souvenirs or being removed years after the war.¹⁵² In the macho culture of the army, scars were a way to prove one had done their part, exemplified by phrases like “my résumé is on my hide” and a “a scar decorates a man.”¹⁵³ Soldiers feared being crippled or disfigured and the military censored both complaints by invalids and images that showed their injuries.¹⁵⁴ Nonetheless, wounds carried a certain ambiguity, as Political Officer Nagim Khafizov, examining the piece of shrapnel that hit him in the spring of 1945, reflected: “I can’t be angry with it—you see it could have been worse—it could have killed or permanently disfigured me. So it turns out that this fragment ‘saved’ me. However, I am upset with it, because it took me from the ranks in the most interesting days of the war.”¹⁵⁵ Wounds could be terrifying but were not necessarily unwelcome. Khafizov was not alone in thinking that a piece of shrapnel had “saved” him.

Loginov’s men all eagerly anticipated an offensive in part because they might “receive a light wound and finally get enough sleep in the hospital. Nobody thinks about the fact that he could be killed.”¹⁵⁶ The Red Army had no regular system of furloughs or leave, so being wounded was the only exit from a system of service in which units fought until they suffered heavy losses and were then rebuilt.157 Hospitals were often referred to as “heaven”—a place where soldiers could rest.¹⁵⁸ Being wounded meant that the army could make fewer claims on the body and was a visceral demonstration that you were fulfilling your duties.

The army’s strict disciplinary regime touched the wounded as well. Soldiers were provided with a bandage to patch themselves up, and regulations gave specific instructions to soldiers who were wounded: “If wounded, bandage yourself and continue to fight. Leave the battlefield with the permission of your commander. Take your personal weapon and one pack (magazine) of cartridges; if it is necessary to move, crawl with your weapon to cover and wait for a medic. It is forbidden to leave the battlefield to accompany the wounded.”¹⁵⁹ Given that prisoners and the wounded were often disposed of on the battlefield, this policy had a practical side. This order highlights the gray zone that wounded soldiers inhabited as government property—they were no longer active defenders and thus no longer top priority, and Red Army medical treatment often left men and women more or less on their own.

As we see from combat regulations, soldiers were instructed to actively wait for or effect their own evacuation. Both postwar and wartime medical literature points to the fact that soldiers were often expected to walk to medical units on their own.¹⁶⁰ Medics provided basic medical treatment (i.e., stopped bleeding, made splints, etc.) and helped nonambulatory patients evacuate. But medics suffered high casualties and were often too few to provide effective services.¹⁶¹ Once soldiers arrived at either a medical point, the first relatively safe place where the wounded could rest, or a Medsanbat (Medical Sanitary Battalion), they received further treatment. At the Medsanbat, the decision was made to treat soldiers within their own unit (light shrapnel and bullet wounds, burns, and minor frostbite) or to evacuate them away from the unit and further to the rear. Medics also sorted soldiers by the character of their injuries, and a variety of specialized wards and hospitals was set up to deal with particular types of wounds at the front level.¹⁶²

Regulations provided for an adequate system, but reality created a much messier situation. One senior medical officer pointed to a 250-bed hospital on the Kalinin Front that in March 1942 received 13,335 wounded and another that functioned at quadruple capacity for a month.¹⁶³ Services at such overcrowded hospitals were sparse, to say the least. Boris Komskii, wounded at the Battle of Kursk, complained to his diary that medical services were “disgracefully disorganized.” His hospital was “an empty hut with broken windows,” where soldiers slept “on the floor, four men on two mattresses,” which they, all suffering from arm wounds, had to stuff themselves. There was nothing to do, nothing to read, and meals were poorly organized, making his “soul ache.”164

Experienced medical personnel were often in short supply, as were all resources. Creative doctors and nurses learned to adapt to these conditions, but exhausted and inexperienced personnel were pushed to the limits during heavy fighting.¹⁶⁵ Under these conditions, hospital personnel often failed to keep proper records on both the living and the dead, neither notifying the next of kin nor providing a proper burial.¹⁶⁶ Even worse, in the massive retreats of 1941 and 1942 the wounded were often abandoned by retreating comrades, as Aleksei Shtin reflected while convalescing: “In general the situation in the first days was such that if you were wounded and couldn’t walk, that meant you were dead.”¹⁶⁷ Conversely, when the army advanced rapidly, it could outrun its hospitals, leaving wounded to fend for themselves for extended periods.¹⁶⁸

Wounded soldiers were at the mercy of the situation at the front, the level of organization in their unit, and the skills of those providing treatment. The Medsanbat of the 322nd Rifle Division could boast of ideal organization in 1944, with soldiers immediately being washed and shaved, their hair cut, their clothing disinfected, and the nature of their wounds recorded. Men and women were even separated to prevent the spread of venereal disease.¹⁶⁹ However, not all units were this well organized. Some hospitals evacuated soldiers too severely injured to safely transport—for example, with a shattered jaw, crushed trachea, or gut shot—worsening their agony. Others needing only minor treatment were sent to rear-area hospitals, depriving the severely afflicted of their place in overcrowded wards.¹⁷⁰ Last but not least, wounded soldiers were often left to move from one hospital to another without any transport or food, sometimes while still under enemy fire.¹⁷¹ Steppe Front war correspondent Rostkov wrote to party officials in the fall of 1943 complaining that passing trucks refused to take wounded soldiers and that commanders and medical personnel frequently had no idea where to direct groups of wounded soldiers. This lack of attention to the needs of the wounded prompted soldiers to complain: “We are so needed in battle, but as soon as we are wounded we aren’t needed by anyone.”¹⁷² Salvageable bodies were much more valuable than those that the war had used up, and the Red Army medical system was geared to get soldiers back into combat as quickly as possible.

At the end of the war it was claimed that 77.5 percent of the wounded were returned to the ranks, and during the war wounded soldiers were reminded that “the vast majority of soldiers return to the front, so it is not suitable to get accustomed to the gentle atmosphere [teplichnaia obstanovka] of the hospital.”173 The lightly wounded were left in the Medsanbat so that they could return to their unit as quickly as possible. This practice led some soldiers who were badly wounded to stay in the Medsanbat rather than evacuate, so that they could remain with their comrades and maintain their status.¹⁷⁴ Some units reported that the Medsanbat was their primary source for replacement manpower.¹⁷⁵

FIGURE 1.4 Senior Lieutenant A. I. Chadaev and Sergeant S. Mamedov, wounded while crossing the Dnepr, 1943. They have fashioned slings from their belts. RGAKFD 0-65230.

While recuperating in hospitals, returning to their old unit, or making a place for themselves in a new unit, soldiers learned of the death of their comrades and had time to realize the dual cycles that governed the use of their bodies.¹⁷⁶ The first was the attrition of military units, a constant cycle of filling the ranks, training, and losses at the front until a unit was taken off the line to rebuild. The second was the soldier’s individual path through this system, from training to the front to being wounded and filtered through various hospitals until returning to the front via either a marching company or a recovery team, special units for soldiers returning from hospitals.¹⁷⁷ This second cycle led to soldiers constantly establishing links with new comrades: in trains, wards, and on the march, and soldiers were encouraged to share their experiences and learn from each other while traveling and recovering.¹⁷⁸ This cycle would continue until a soldier was killed, captured, or crippled or the war ended.

The Fragile Little Cog

The goals of the government and soldier both overlapped and contradicted each other. Most soldiers wanted to defeat the Nazis, but they also wanted to survive. The state was prepared to pay a massive cost in the lives of its citizens in order to endure. This fostered the fatalism common among soldiers that David Samoilov ascribed to the peasant background of most of those in ranks, epitomized by the folk saying: “Don’t volunteer for anything, and don’t refuse anything.”179 Both violent coercion and peer pressure to do one’s fair share weighed on soldiers as their bodies were offered in exchange for territory, enemy machinery, and the lives of enemy soldiers. To accomplish all of this, the government invested commanders with a power over soldiers that verged on ownership, declaring commanders to be the face of the state, even if this power could be highly conditional.

In return for everything that the government demanded from soldiers, it would feed and clothe them better than average citizens, arm them, show genuine concern for the conditions in which they lived, and invest the soldier’s every action with meaning. In the following chapters, we will see how Dzhuma, whose shivering, naked body opened this chapter, and millions of his comrades were clothed, fed, armed, sheltered, entertained, and later given license to take enemy property. Before these men and women would preserve the Soviet Union and defeat the Third Reich, the government took possession of their bodies. The state and soldier would negotiate their new relationship via objects in the course of the war. These soldiers would also be forced to come to terms with each other on an intimate, everyday level in which their lives were in constant danger. The common ground of such diverse people was the sparse assortment of army issue objects and practices surrounding their use. Their experiences would significantly alter what it meant to be “Soviet.”